


Time Stands Still

by Yummy_Yume



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Bad Wolf, Eleventh Doctor/Clara Oswin Oswald - Freeform, F/M, Present Tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:01:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25745530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yummy_Yume/pseuds/Yummy_Yume
Summary: She promised him forever.
Relationships: Eleventh Doctor/Rose Tyler, The Doctor (Doctor Who)/Rose Tyler
Comments: 4
Kudos: 41





	Time Stands Still

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [By Any Other Name](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21431800) by [ChasingtheCosmos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChasingtheCosmos/pseuds/ChasingtheCosmos). 



> I love ChasingtheCosmos' AU and I couldn't let it go. Sorry, not sorry. 
> 
> I apologize for any spelling or grammar errors, English is not my first language.

Rose is burning. If the Doctor doesn’t do something she will die. But he will do something, so there’s no need to worry. She only has so much time before he takes the vortex out of her and she has so much to do.

She’s the Bad Wolf and the Doctor may not know it, but she’s been saving his life for a long time. The Game Station is just where she’s born, but Time isn’t linear and she’s currently, for just a few seconds more, the Goddess of Time. And she loves Him.

Love will really make you do anything. She hasn’t even known him for that long, but she would do the impossible for him and saving his life before he even met her is the simplest thing she’s ever done. She simply needs an alias, a new face he can vaguely remember from the corner of his eye. Because the Doctor never saw or knew Rose Tyler before the basement in Henrik’s and it can’t change. In order for her to be there and absorb the Time Vortex, he can’t know, can’t suspect her of anything.

Her Leather Jacket Doctor, so untrusting. (She wouldn’t change him for the world.)

Creating a new identity is easy. He changes his face all the time, so why can’t she? Petite, brunette, thinner lips, bigger eyes. She doesn’t look like Rose Tyler at all, but it doesn’t matter. This face is just an avatar for the Bad Wolf so she can save him until they met.

That’s for the past, now to the Future.

Oh.

Parallel Universe. Complicated.

What to do. What to do.

Well, she was planning to match her timeline to his, because she promised him forever – will promised him? Is promising him? Tenses are so confusing right now – but she can’t let the human Doctor on his own. He’s the Doctor and she loves him. She loves all of him and she can promise this him a forever too. A human lifespan with him. And then back to her own universe.

Except.

Except that Rose Tyler is dead and the dead can’t come back to life.

…

That’s fine she just needs a new body. And look at that! She already created an avatar for herself! Now, she just needs to tweak it a little, so it’ll be human-plus and not prone to dying. Plus, it’s easier to only transfer her consciousness from one universe to the other. And voilà! Forever with him.

A few more twists and tweaks and a telephone number on a post-it so he’ll find her when it’s time and here she is!

Now all she needs is a name. Shite. She hadn’t thought of a name.

She feels someone nudging her and accepts the TARDIS’ input. Clara. Claaaaaa-ra. Cla _ra_. She likes it. The Old Girl has been helping with her planning, Rose doesn’t mind if she chooses the final name. It’s nice even. Clara is a creation from them both and a way for Rose to always be there for him.

Clara. An ordinary name for an unordinary girl.

One day, in a parallel universe, Rose Tyler will die and when she’ll breathe again, she’ll have changed her face. A new body, a new accent, a new her. For all intent and purpose, a regeneration.

“I think you need a Doctor,” her Leather Jacket Doctor jokes feebly and if Rose wasn’t burning, she would have laughed. Instead, she kisses him back and lets him take the vortex out of her.

It’ll take time, but there’ll be together forever. The Doctor and Rose Tyler in the TARDIS, as it should be.

.

.

.

When Rose opens her eyes, she’s standing in front of a nice house. Inside lives the Maitland family and the father is looking for a live-in nanny after the death of his wife, until he can learn to cope on his own. And Rose, well, she just died.

Memories from her time when she was Bad Wolf had been trickling into her mind like grains of sand into an hourglass since the Doctor left her on a cold Norwegian beach with his metacrisis and she knows that she’ll be soon reunited with the Time Lord Doctor.

She told her husband, of course. At first, she couldn’t make sense of it, but he was there to soothe her headaches and explain things she shouldn’t know, share his stories that she sort of remembered without remembering like a catalogue of déjà-vu suddenly appearing in her mind. When she finally knew enough, when she understood what she had done as Bad Wolf, the reach she had and exploited, he had smiled softly and caller her his Impossible Girl.

He hadn’t been jealous that one day, when it was his time, she would go back to his Time Lord incarnation in their original dimension. The confirmation that she loved him, all versions of him, and that she had made arrangements to fulfil her promise to both the human and the Time Lord had only made him happier. And they had been so very happy.

With a small smile, Rose rings the doorbell. Her only possessions are the clothes on her back and the content of her purse, which only contains the paperwork of her new identity. The Doctor will be there in a few months, just enough time to reacquaint herself with her original universe and integrate herself back in the society.

Until then, she’ll miss him.

“Clara?” George Maitland asks when he opens the door. “Clara Oswald?”

“It’s me. Good morning!”

.

.

.

In this new body, Rose favours dresses and skirts and it would be weird if she hadn’t experienced this with the Doctor twice already. Her husband had a bit of Donna in him, so some things had changed, not a lot, but enough to make the distinction between Time Lord and human.

New clothes preferences, new taste buds - It’s been two months since she appeared back in this universe in her new body and Rose is still going through the process of relearning what she likes.

She had been quite dismay to find that this body doesn’t like chips as much as her previous one. It is in all honestly a tragedy and she has yet to find something she likes as much as she used to like chips. And even if she is weirdly obsessed with soufflés, it isn’t her favourite food either. Plus, she still needs to work on her recipe.

On another note, she really likes the Maitlands. Artie and Angie are typical teenagers, but there’re both so smart and George is busy and grieving, but he’s doing pretty great all thing considering. Rose has been helping with homework, cleaning and cooking, and while she enjoys their company, it was only ever meant to be temporary.

It’s time she tries to find the Doctor.

Two days ago, _Bad Wolf electronics_ opened across the building where she likes to go shopping and she didn’t even think before she bought a laptop. Bad Wolf knew what she was doing, and Rose simply has to follow her lead. Although right now, she’s pretty annoyed with her because Rose just can’t find the bloody internet. She was planning to hack into UNIT, see if she could find something about his whereabouts, but with the way things are going, Rose doesn’t have a choice but to call the helpline number the lady manning _Bad Wolf Electronics_ scribbled on a post-it for her.

It takes a long time for someone to pick up.

“Hello?”

“Ah! Hello!” Rose replies, forcing some cheerfulness into her tone. “I can't find the internet.”

“Sorry…?” the man responds slowly.

“Well, I'm trying to get my Wi-Fi connected,” she elaborates, “but there’s just… nothing there?”

“The Internet?” the man repeated dubiously. “It’s 1207…”

“No, I've got half-past three,” Rose replies slowly, glancing at the date and time readout at the bottom of her laptop screen. “Could that be part of the issue? Is there something wrong with my settings?”

“Listen, where did you get this number?” the man demands, completely ignoring her.

“The… woman at the shop? Bad Wolf electronics?” she replies hesitantly. “She wrote it down for me. This… this is a helpline, isn't it?”

“Bad Wolf…” he breathes out. “Do not move! I’ll be there in a second! Do _not_ , under any circumstances, _move_.”

And then he hangs up and the dial tone rings in Rose’s ear for a second longer before it stops.

The hope surging into her is almost suffocating. Rose doesn’t even think before she starts throwing everything she owns into her suitcase. She doesn’t care that it’s all going to be wrinkled.

It’s him, right?

Who else could it possibly be?

She’s already running down the stairs when someone starts knocking frantically on the mottled glass of the front door. When she opened the door, she doesn’t recognise his face.

“Clara?” he asks. “Clara Oswin Oswald?”

“Just Clara,” she replies, letting the suitcase drop at their feet.

“Do you remember me?”

“Not like you remember me.” And she smiles.

“What are you saying? What does it _mean_?”

“Do you remember a woman from the corner of your eye? Always there, always… _dying_?”

His face crumbled immediately.

“You were there at the Dalek Asylum. And then in Victorian London.”

“If you remember seeing me then it means it was time for you to find me. The real me.”

“ _Who_ are you? How could you possibly be in all those places?”

“There were only avatars. I needed a face you didn’t know in order to save you, because if you knew me before you met me, you wouldn’t have let me join you and I would never have been able to save you.”

“I don’t understand,” he replies, shaking his head and closing his eyes. “Why would you save me?”

“Because I want you safe, my Doctor.”

“What?” When he opens his eyes again, there are impossibly wide and the expression on his face breaks her heart.

“I looked into the TARDIS and the TARDIS looked into me. And for those precious seconds where I saw all that was, all that is, all that ever could be, I made sure that you were safe. I made sure that I would grow old with my half-human Doctor, but once that body died, I needed a new one and I used the one I already created. It’s like a regeneration!”

“Rose?” He chokes.

“I promised you forever. I already fulfil my promise with my human Doctor, now it’s your turn.” She extends her hand to him and opens her mind. “Want to see it? We had a fantastic life.”

When he finally – _finally_ – hugs her, there are tears seeping into the fabrics of her dress.

Rose reciprocates the hug and doesn’t let go for what feels like hours. They have all the time in the universe now.

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](https://yummyyume.tumblr.com/)


End file.
